Scientists Discover Gravitational Waves

WE ARE NOT ONLY GOING TO BE SEEING THE UNIVERSE, WE ARE GOING TO BE LISTENING TO IT.

Scientists announce discovery of clear Gravitational wave signal which ripples in spacetime! Originally, Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Relativity theory in 1915. The theory that proposed spacetime as a concept. The waves are a distortion of spacetime. Scientist believe that this discovery open new vistas into the dark side of the Universe.

Physicists confirmed they had detected unambiguous signals of gravitational waves emanating from the collision of two massive black holes 1.3 billion light years away in deep space. The wave that LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) observatories picked up left behind an audible signal that scientists played for reporters at a news conference.

Scientist detected the collision of two black holes. One black hole had the mass of 29 suns; and the other was the equivalent of 36 suns. Each black hole had 30 miles (50 kilometers) of diameter. With the help of the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

That is one of the beautiful things about this, We are not only going to be seeing the universe, we are going to be listening to it.

said Gabriela Gonzalez, a professor of physics and astronomy in a press conference at Louisiana State University.

“It will undoubtedly allow us to see into areas we wouldn’t be able to see otherwise,” Krauss said. “It’s the astronomy of the 21st century, and where it goes is anyone’s guess. But its significance is comparable to when we first opened up the telescope, or maybe when we first began to look at the sky with radio waves.”

“There’s been a lot of indirect evidence for their existence,” says Shoemaker, an expert in black holes. “But this is the first time we actually detect two black holes merging and we know the only thing that predicts that (is) gravitational radiation, (which) comes from a binary black hole merging. There’s no other way we could have seen that but gravitationally.”

Why Gravitational Wave important?

Gravitational waves are so exciting because they were the last major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity that had to be confirmed, and discovering them will help us understand how the Universe is shaped by mass.

The detection of gravitational waves not only confirms Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it amounts to the first direct detection of a pair of colliding black holes, the mysterious structures in space that are so dense they exert a gravitational force from which nothing – not even light – can escape.

What next?

The detection of gravitational waves could allow scientists to build something like a time machine to look into the earliest and darkest parts of the universe. It could also allow to reach back and understand how black holes and the universe itself were formed.